office, and (in a minor degree) the jealous segregation of the executive and legislative authorities by the exclusion of Ministers from Congress, are all consequences of uncurbed democracy which it has been confessed by some, even of the most advanced Liberals on both sides of the Atlantic, that the soundest community could not long survive; and they are well aware that all these consequences are aggravated by admitting to a full and immediate partnership of power the millions of adventurers whom Europe has poured upon the American shores. But they have also felt that, except in some great convulsion, no man is strong enough to put the bit between the teeth of a democracy. The terrible opportunity is now ready to their hand. When the present struggle closes, the central power at Washington will probably have a stronger hold over all that continues to own its sway than it has ever had before or will ever have again. We only trust that the occasion will not be missed by the stronger spirits whom the present distress is likely to bring to the surface of affairs. To have seized that moment for remoulding the American polity into a happier form will be a truer service in the eyes of all wise patriots than a brilliant succession of desolating victories from Richmond to New Orleans.

But the future of England, rather than the future of America, is the point to which our thoughts are naturally turned by the contemplation of these calamities. An Anglo-Saxon race, in the full light of modern civilization, free from all the aristocratic interests which, according to Mr. Bright, are the sole cause of war, has plunged into a deadly civil conflict of which no one can foresee the end. It is a spectacle full of warning to those in whose veins the same blood flows, and whose political constitution has sprung from the same stock. We naturally look about us to see whether any similar danger threatens ourselves. May it not be, that we have been sucked into the same current, and are insensibly gliding towards the same fatal shore? If we have thoughtlessly aped the extravagances of America in the heyday of her folly, it is time we should take warning from her ruin. What is England doing? How has she received the lesson which has been given to her in the history of her headstrong offspring?

On the public opinion of the nation at large, we believe that the lesson has not been lost. The change which has been and is taking place in the temper and policy of the House of Commons shows that it has sunk deeper into men's hearts than can be gathered from any ostensible change of political profession. The course of the House during the present Session has been very cheering. It has not been satisfied with the inert manifestations

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of ill-will with which it stifled the little bill' of last year. It has proceeded this year to a positive renunciation of the opinions to which statesmen of all schools, allowing their fears to gag their consciences, so long bowed as to an inevitable necessity. The symptoms of penitence with which the year began have strengthened and deepened in proportion as the breakdown of the American democracy became more evident and more irreparable. The Parliament which commenced its existence in 1859 by condemning Lord Derby, because his Reform Bill was not liberal enough, has successively and by increasing majorities refused any Reform at all. It has declined to extend the franchise in counties or in boroughs, or to admit within its walls fresh representatives of that part of our constituency which bears most resemblance to the constituencies of America. Nor has the reaction been confined to mere politics. The Church, against whose existence the state of things in America has always been paraded as a conclusive argument, has shared the benefit of the change. Men have bethought them that, even to the politician, the gentler spirit which the Church's influence infuses into our social conflicts has its value. The main dogmas of Christianity need no Establishment to maintain them; but the milder manners and more moderate tone of opinion and action which distinguish our branch of the Anglo-Saxon race are due in a great degree to a religious polity which discourages all extremes, and which is never driven for its own support to lash up the fanaticism of its adherents. The division list of the House of Commons has indicated pretty plainly the increased consideration in which the principle of an Establishment is held. Every one of the subtle instruments devised by the Liberation Society for sapping the Church's temporal foundations have failed. Majority after majority has repelled the assaults which the Dissenters have thinly masked behind a plea of suffering conscience. But the strength of the reaction was not fully gauged until it succeeded in reducing, in the same House of Commons, a majority of seventy-one against Church Rates, to a majority of one in their favour. In all these reactionary divisions the House has rather followed than gone before the nation. 'The republican bubble has burst,' and with it a thousand theories to which philosophers of the new light formerly paid homage. The mass of the educated classes feel that the argument is no longer where it was. Democratic change now lacks the one recommendation that has power with the English mind-practical success. Whatever our anomalies or our differences may be, it is better to bear the ills we have, than to fly to others whose full bitterness we know in the calamities of a kindred nation. But

But cheering as is the tone of English opinion, when we recollect the follies in which a few years ago large bodies of sane men acquiesced, we must not blind ourselves to the dangers by which we are still encompassed. The authors of the delusions from which the nation has just escaped are still among us, ready to take advantage of any moment of weakness or neglect. It seems almost incredible that, with the warnings before their eyes which each mail from America brings home, there should still be men eager to travel along the same fatal path and court the same fearful destiny. But no failures discourage the genuine fanatic. Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright, the fervent neophyte vieing with the veteran confessor, are still labouring as indefatigably, though perhaps not so hopefully as ever, to pull down in faithful imitation of their great exemplar all that exalts itself above the dead democratic level. What object Mr. Gladstone may be consciously pursuing we do not, of course, venture to decide. No psychologist that ever existed could solve such a problem. But the connexion between the object to which he persuades himself he is looking, and the direction in which he is really tending, has always been of the slenderest kind. Sometimes he confides to the world his intentions, so that we have a basis for calculating the relation which they bear to the course he actually pursues. Last year he told the House that ten thousand men, together with several batteries of Armstrong guns, constituted an expedition bearing peaceful remonstrances to the mouth of the Peiho.' This year he informed the House that his proposal for insulting the House of Lords and subsidizing out of the Exchequer the newspapers belonging to his new allies, was meant as a 'proposal of conciliation to the Opposition.' In the same way he constantly replies to the despairing complaints of the rural members, that his policy has always been peculiarly favourable to the landed interest. With such specimens before us of the process by which he interprets his own acts to his own mind, it is impossible for us to pretend to say whether he considers himself a Democrat or a Conservative. In judging, however, of public men, we must not accept their own estimate of themselves; for even Mr. Bright is fond of calling himself ‘a true Conservative.' We must judge by acts, not words.

During the last ten years Mr. Gladstone has dealt with taxation, with expenditure, with the constitution of the House of Commons, and with the powers of the House of Lords. Upon all these subjects he has laboured to assimilate Old England to New England, and to follow the path which our most enthusiastic demagogues have marked out. His finance has ever tended to accumulate upon the holders of fixed property every

public burden-just as is done in Massachusetts and New York. It may suit him now, when he sees that further progress is impracticable, to say that he intends to go no further, and to leave our finance just as it stands. But last year, when the intoxication of a fancied popularity laid bare for a moment his real inclinations to the world, he was not so modest in his anticipations. In both his Budget speeches he strongly laid down the doctrine that a stationary policy in finance was a retrograde policy, and that in the removal of indirect taxation it was our duty to be constantly moving onwards. He has been equally faithful to Mr. Bright in the matter of expenditure. He has even gone so far in his devotion to the Peace party, that he has denounced and decried again and again the very estimates that he himself in his official capacity was moving. These are, however, comparatively minor matters. They were imitations of America in non-essentials, though they indicated sufficiently the general tendency of his policy. He and Mr. Bright have worked together to Americanize our institutions in points of far more moment. Two barriers stand between us and the uncurbed dominion of the multitude. One of them is the restricted number of those who elect the House of Commons, and the other is the independence of the House of Lords. Mr. Gladstone has been eager and active in the work of tearing down both these barriers. Last year he delivered one of the few speeches that came from the Treasury bench in favour of the degradation of the suffrage. This year, pressing into his service an unwilling Cabinet, he led the way in attempting to take away all independent power from the House of Lords. On the gravity of this last step we will not enlarge ourselves, or quote from any of those who urged the House of Commons to forbear. The fairest way of describing its real purpose and meaning is by quoting from the Io Paan, which, when the measure had been carried, those who had urged it the most strongly sang over the humbled House of Peers. In the original it is printed in the spaced type of an official communication:

"Their lordships must by this time be abundantly conscious that they made a great mistake in grasping at functions from which centuries of constitutional usage have hedged them off. They have sustained not only defeat, but humiliation. They have tried to become masters in the State, only to prove that they are the servants of servants. They have forced upon their own experience and the popular observation the disagreeable truth that, as regards finance, they have merely to register the resolutions of the Commons, have no more power of initiation, alteration, or even rejection, than the seal which will presently be affixed upon the act they would have liked to tear in pieces.'-Morning Star, June 12th, 1861.

In

In this spirit fresh attacks are constantly directed from the same quarter against the scanty remains of power left to the House of Lords. They were threatened with a renewal of the same process as that which has humiliated them upon the Paper Duty, if they should venture to throw out the Church Rate Bill. Even their modification of the Bankruptcy Bill is inveighed against as a 'patrician usurpation.' Mr. Gladstone's success in humbling the Lords has furnished a fulcrum for future operations which will not be slackly used. It may have suited him on the eve of a division, in which the suspicion of partnership with Mr. Bright might have cost him fifty votes, to disavow his odious comrade. But no one who-setting aside indefinite professions-takes a broad view of his acts, observes the results to which they tend, and notes the character of the adherents by whom they have been the most enthusiastically received, will doubt that Mr. Gladstone is at once Mr. Bright's truest and most formidable ally.

It is an accession of strength to the demagogue's band which all friends of the constitution must deplore. We can only trust that he will be as outspoken as his new associate. His great power for evil in recent years has lain in the disguise which a vague and copious verbiage threw around his change of creed. The recollection of his old Conservatism, not formally disavowed, still retained some slight hold upon the sympathies of a few. But the alliance of Mr. Bright has been an advertisement of Radicalism which no indistinctness of language can counteract. We cherish hopes, therefore, that he will be less dangerous as an open foe than as a half-friend. But whatever danger he or his allies may threaten, it is only an additional motive to the friends of the constitution to be watchful and united. We know the stake we are playing for, and the perils which it rests on this generation to avert. No doubt the attempts will be renewed ere long to lower the electoral suffrage in the House of Commons and to extinguish the House of Lords. The fanatic devotees of democracy will not relax their efforts to bring us under its obedience. But at least we now know the character of

the master to whose yoke we are to bend. Theories of perfectibility, dreams of popular infallibility, have now been scattered to the winds. The simple ones who will accept the prosperity of mechanics' institutes and the circulation of cheap books as an argument for democracy are reduced to a very scanty flock. { Fine phrases about confidence in the English people will no longer conceal from the eyes of the most sentimental the insanity of seating hungry ignorance upon a despotic throne. If now we submit to democratic changes, with our eyes open, we do it in despite of all the warning that the most ample experience can

afford.